Pinoy Capital

Home to 33,000 Filipino American residents, Daly City, California, located just outside of San Francisco, has been dubbed “the Pinoy Capital of the United States.” In this fascinating ethnographic study of the lives of Daly City residents, Benito Vergara shows how Daly City has become a magnet for the growing Filipino American community.

Vergara challenges rooted notions of colonialism here, addressing the immigrants’ identities, connections and loyalties. Using the lens of transnationalism, he looks at the “double lives” of both recent and established Filipino Americans. Vergara explores how first-generation Pinoys experience homesickness precisely because Daly City is filled with reminders of their homeland’s culture, like newspapers, shops and festivals. Vergara probes into the complicated, ambivalent feelings these immigrants have—toward the Philippines and the United States—and the conflicting obligations they have presented by belonging to a thriving community and yet possessing nostalgia for the homeland and people they left behind.

Cover

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Chapter 1. A Repeated Turning

One will hear the joke told, eventually, though it hardly ever sounds
like one. It’s almost always delivered casually, thrown out like an off-hand
rhetorical question, as a matter of incontestable fact. “You know
why it’s always foggy in Daly City, right? Because all the Filipinos turn on their
rice cookers at the same time.” This particuar teller of the joke (Wally, a news-...

Chapter 2. Little Manila

If you drive down California’s Skyline Highway a little too fast, you might
miss Daly City altogether. Bordering San Francisco to its south, Daly City,
like much of suburban America, stretches its boundaries into the next
town, in a diffuse mass of tract housing—varying in age, cost, architecture,
and prestige—that extends from the Sunset District in San Francisco all the...

Chapter 3. Looking Forward: Narratives of Obligation

When he was 11, Wally Curameng1 dreamed of coming to America.
His cousins, who were his earliest childhood playmates, immigrated
to the United States. “Even then,” he told me, “I was already
excited to come here to the States because my cousins, they’d write,
they’d send pictures—it’s like this in the United States, it’s great in the...

Chapter 4. Spreading the News: Newspapers and Transnational Belonging

If the desire for transnationality is embedded in Filipino immigrant lives,
it is perhaps most prominently displayed in the pages of a newspaper. The
Philippine News, a Filipino weekly newspaper based in South San Francisco,
California, is the most politically influential of all Filipino newspapers
in the United States and also one of the oldest. It is the most widely circulated...

Chapter 5. Looking Back: Indifference, Responsibility, and the Anti-Marcos Movement in the United States

The tension between the desire to demonstrate immigrant achievement
and the need for political awareness may be directed “forward”
to the United States or, more importantly, “back” to the Philippines.
I argue that the call to remembrance, to a kind of nationalism outside of the
country’s borders, is integral to understanding the Filipino community. The...

Chapter 6. Betrayal and Belonging

Many scholars have used the push-pull model of migration, but it has
been criticized for its neo-functionalism and assumption of discrete, autonomous
receiving and sending states (Rouse 1992). Rouse adds that “the emphasis
on a bipolar framework has obscured the ways in which many
settlers . . . have managed to maintain active involvements with the people...

Chapter 7. Citizenship and Nostalgia

If the immigrant predicament requires the careful balancing of obligations
to homeland and new home—as manifested in the acts of turning
and turning back—then it is made all the more difficult by perceptions of
betrayal. Citizenship, or the act of naturalization, is one of the more definitive
acts that can foreclose the possibility of “turning back.” To become an...

Chapter 8. Pinoy Capital

On a summer day in 1931, the writer Carlos Bulosan stood on the deck
of a ship after almost a month in steerage and saw America for the
first time. He felt he had come home.
We arrived in Seattle on a June day. My first sight of the approaching
land was an exhilarating experience. Everything seemed native and
promising to me. It was like coming home after a long voyage, although...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.